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  She put on a sweater and went outside to sit on the deck. No sooner had she done so than she realized Marsha was sitting up on the stairs. Without invitation she came down and sat beside Dana.

  “He always come home late?”

  “He’s got a lot of work.”

  “Means you and the little girl are alone a lot. You lock your doors?”

  Dana asked, “Did you talk to the police?”

  Marsha blew smoke out the corner of her mouth and shook her head. “Must have been him knocked on the door, but I didn’t answer. I don’t have to talk to cops unless I want to.”

  “This wasn’t about you. He wanted to know if you saw anyone at the house. Maybe making a delivery?”

  Marsha stubbed her cigarette out in an empty tuna can. “Someone in a white van stopped by. Put something through your mail slot. “

  Dana felt a huge relief. She was not paranoid. A white van had been following her and Bailey. “A man or a woman?”

  “Guy. Why? What’s happened?”

  “We got hate mail today.”

  “Because of Frank, I s’pose.”

  “Would you be able to recognize the guy from the van?”

  “Maybe.”

  Dana went back into the house and called Gary. She left a message on his voice mail. “It was a white van,” she said, not bothering to identify herself or hide the gloating in her voice. “Marsha Filmore saw it, and she might be able to identify the man who came to the door. She said she’d go down to the station, but you’ll have to send a car for her.”

  She wanted to tell David, so she rang his office, but the answering machine was on there, too. She hung up, gave Moby his nighttime biscuits, and turned off the kitchen lights. As she crossed the foyer to go upstairs, she saw the pile of mail she had left on the floor. She picked it up, sat on the bottom stair, and went through the usual advertising flyers from grocers and drugstores, catalogs, billsa couple she had deliberately let slip the month before. There were three manila envelopes, two of them official-looking and addressed to David.

  The third stopped her breath.

  She recognized Micah’s bold, square printing on the bulky envelope. She stood up and walked into the living room. She turned on a lamp beside the couch and sat down, curling her feet beneath her. As she turned the envelope over and over, her fingertips left damp smudges. Finally she shoved her first finger under the flap, tore it open, and tipped the contents out.

  The striped sash to Bailey’s pink and lime dotted Swiss dress dropped onto her lap. It was the dress she had been wearing the day she disappeared.

  1 he could not move off the couch. There were things she should 3be doing, important calls to make, but she was stuck in place.

  The sash had come with a note.

  Forgive me, Dana, for taking her. Without you I am a monster.

  Where her stomach should have been there was a crater, a vast cavity as if she had been hit by a meteor. One thing she knew: Micah would not have hurt Bailey.

  She’ll be okay, she’ll make it. Thank You, God.

  Moby inched his black nose under her hands and gazed up at her with questioning concern.

  Loving me has made him a monster. She wrapped her arms around the dog’s neck and sobbed until he squeaked and squirmed and pulled away from her. He lay down at her feet, resting his head on his neat front paws, his pointed ears pricked attentively.

  I have to do something….

  But she could not focus, could not carry any thoughts through to the end. Except these:

  Micah had taught Bailey to bodysurf.

  He had been kind to her.

  He would not have molested her, because he only took her to hurt Dana.

  Thank You, God.

  The synapses connecting her brain and her muscles had shorted out. She looped the pink and green sash around her neck like a scarf and absently rubbed the nubby fabric back and forth against her lips. She touched the dotted Swiss to her cheek and felt the fuzzy dots, no bigger than ants. She held it to her nose and tried to inhale something of Bailey, something of Micah. Her daughter’s kidnapper.

  A spark of rage caught fire in her chest.

  Call someone. Gary.

  She remembered the expression on Gary’s face when he virtually accused her of protecting Bailey’s kidnapper. Learning about Micah would confirm his worst suspicions.

  David.

  The details of the scandal would be a gala for the press.

  She shoved the note and sash in her pocket and walked into the kitchen, turned on the tap, and, leaning forward, let the cool water soak her hair as it ran across the back of her neck.

  In David’s hierarchy of values, loyalty ranked above all others. Dana had never doubted his fidelity although she knew he must have had countless opportunities. Women loved power, and even back in college David had it. But it wasn’t in him to cheat. Everyone who knew David knew he could be trusted. He would not understand that in the language of her week with Micah there had been no word for loyalty. In Florence nothing was real, everything was fantasy.

  Micah would be arrested and tried for kidnapping. The affair would come out, and David would probably leave her, and the turmoil of it all would destroy Bailey.

  She dried her hair and neck with a dish towel, then knelt to mop up the mess she’d made on the tiles.

  The way out of her situation was obvious. The answer to her dilemma was silence. She would act as if the note and the sash had never come in the mail. She sat back on her heels. For that to work she had to make sure Micah never came near her family again. Micah. Now when she said his name in her mind, she felt bug-eyed with rage. Incendiary. She wanted to stand before him and let him feel the heat of it. She would tell him to get out of San Diego and never come back. If he came near her or anyone in her family again, she would go to Lieutenant Gary.

  This time she would not destroy the evidence. She would hide the note and the sash in one of her shoe boxes as insurance.

  If you ever come back, if you breathe a word of any part of this, I will go to the police. I swear it on my daughter’s life.

  Dana went outside and across the deck, up the stairs to the garage apartment. She knocked on the door.

  “It’s me, Marsha. Let me in.” She heard sounds from inside, and the door opened. Marsha Filmore wore a black nightgown with spaghetti straps. She held a bottle of scarlet fingernail polish in her hand.

  “I was doing my toes.”

  “Look, I don’t have a lot of time to explain, but an emergency’s come up and I have to go out. David’s working late, and it would really help me if you could babysit.”

  Marsha laughed.

  “What’s funny?”

  “You. Asking me to take care of your little girl.”

  If Dana had been able to think of an alternative, if Guadalupe hadn’t been miles away in Tijuana, if she could have called Lexy without making her curious-

  “Can you do it?”

  “Sure, sure. Just give me a second to change my clothes.”

  Months before, when he had surprised Dana at Arts and Letters in the middle of the night, Micah had told her he lived on the second floor of the old apartment house on the corner of Fourth and Spruce. She nearly ran the light at Washington and Goldfinch, went up University and down Fourth into the Hillcrest District, darting through another intersection on the corner of Fourth and Robinson, swerving around pedestrians in the crosswalk. Driving fast suited her anger and fed it. She knew herself, the way her mind worked. If she did not get to Micah fast, doubt would worm its way into her thoughts and she would begin to second-guess the deception she was setting in motion.

  She parked in front of Micah’s building and looked up to the windows on the second story left, where all the lights were on. Either no one was home in the other apartments or the tenants were sleeping. She did not know what she would do if Micah wasn’t at home. Beside the front door there were mailboxes, and his name was on number four. She tried the knob, and the door swung
open.

  Luck, she told herself. A sign that she was meant to follow through with this.

  The apartment house had the sour detergent-and-cabbage smell of too many tenants cooking meals and washing clothes over a span of too many years. The maroon carpet on the stairs had worn to the wood in the middle of each tread, and the handrail had a metallic shine where the paint was gone. Two apartments opened onto the second-floor landing. Beside one door stood a plastic potted plant and a life-sized ceramic cat with a mouse in its mouth.

  Micah definitely did not live there.

  Dana knocked on the other door and stepped back, surprised, when it, too, opened to her touch.

  Another sign.

  She stood on the threshold and called his name. She stepped inside. “Micah?”

  Next door a dog yapped.

  “Micah, it’s Dana. You left your door open.”

  It was an old-fashioned, railroad-style apartment. The front door opened into a tiny anteroom, which opened into an old kitchen floored with swirls of yellow, orange, and blue linoleum. A sash window over the sink was open, and from the sill a yellow cat with a bell around its neck observed her.

  “Micah?”

  She looked into the living room.

  Was it too late to turn around and go home? Perhaps pack a bag for herself and move to some far desert town, change her name, and find hard work, brain-numbing work? Eventually the desert sun would burn the memories out of her.

  In Micah’s palazzo in Florence there had been paintings and pictures everywhere. Between the back of the couch and the wall, canvases had been filed on their sides, tacked to temporary wooden frames. There were paintings in the bathroom and on the back of the front door. The main room had been a montage of color and images. Nothing matched, but everything in the space seemed to belong there. She remembered waking in Micah’s bed, the smell of turpentine and oil paint, and across the room Micah in the doorway with cups of syrupy Italian chocolate in his hands and a bag of pastries between his teeth like a dog. She remembered the feel of the sheets and the river-smelling air coming in the window over her head.

  She remembered everything.

  In the bare-walled and shabbily furnished living room on Spruce Street he lay lengthwise on the floor, and his feet were bare, the soles pink, as if he had just bathed. His head was turned to one side so that what Dana saw was his ruddy cheek and the way his hair curled around his ears and the golden glow of his earring. From where she stood, paralyzed, he looked almost perfect.

  His other cheek lay in the blood that had pooled around the bullet hole in his head and soaked into the worn wooden floor.

  She did not scream; her throat had sealed shut.

  She looked at his feet again, at the vulnerability of their tender pinkness. Waves of despair and shame and grief hit so hard they seemed to have velocity. She dropped to her knees, took hold of his ankles, and rested her cheek against his instep. She remembered that she had loved Micah. Not forever, not even for a long time, but for a few days, and as intensely as she had ever loved anyone.

  The dog was yapping again. She heard footsteps.

  Dana turned around and looked into Lexy’s eyes.

  n ambulance had taken Micah’s body. The police arrived and masked questions impossible to answer honestly.

  “Why would he want to kill himself?”

  Lexy replied, “He’s always talked about it. Since he was a teenager.” Not an answer, barely an explanation lost in tears and confusion. The policeman led her to the couch and told her to sit. Dana saw how he stood over her, his body language a mix of protection and frustration.

  Lexy had come through the door into the apartment, and there was no time for Dana to explain anything. Lexy’s grief rushed out of her, filled the moment, and left no space for questions or explanations to form. It was Dana who called 911.

  “Why were you here, Mrs. Cabot?” Though the officer, Robert Oliphant, was younger than Gary by a decade, he had the same tone of voice that implied he had seen everything and could not be fooled or surprised or shocked. “How’d you get in? D’you have a key? “

  “The door was open.”

  “How do you know the victim?”

  Dana looked at Lexy. “His sister’s my best friend.”

  Dana could not tell if Lexy was paying attention to the questions. She sat on the edge of Micah’s saggy oatmeal-colored couch, staring down at the ancient parquet. Dana did not try to comfort her. There was no way to break through the wall suddenly between them. She did not want to try, because an army of questions lay in wait on the other side.

  She had to get home quickly, send Marsha Filmore back to her apartment, and get into bed before David came home.

  Now, in panic mode, her priorities were clear. Answer Oliphant’s questions quickly and decisively. Look him straight in the eye and give him no reason to suspect she was being anything but true-blue honest.

  “He’s my friend’s brother.” She added in a softer voice, “He asked me to come over because he had a picture he wanted to give me.

  Lexy looked up, her face flushed and tearstained. “Which picture?”

  “I don’t know. One of the Florence sketches, I think. He always said he was going to give me one.”

  Oliphant rubbed his chin. “Seems peculiar, him calling you and then killing himself. And it’s pretty late at night. He didn’t say anything that might have let you know …”

  “Nothing.”

  “When did he call you?”

  Dana was not sure, but she thought the police might be able to check the phone records. So she said, “He didn’t call. I ran into him on the street. I was buying bread.” As she held her breath, she thought of what Imogene had told her, that she was a liar like her mother. She knew this to be true, because while she strung the lies together she was perfectly calm. It wasn’t even a challenge to meet Oliphant’s gaze. She read in his expression that he believed her. She was free to go.

  “We’ll call you if there’s anything comes up. You’ll have to make a formal statement.”

  “Of course,” she said. “You know I’ll help in any way I can.”

  She picked up her purse and walked over to the couch where Lexy huddled, watching her. She sat beside her friend and wrapped her arms around her. In her arms, Lexy felt bony and cold.

  “I’ve got to get home to Bay. I’ll come by your place tomorrow.”

  “I’ll be at work.”

  “No one expects you-“

  “You didn’t see him on the street.” Lexy’s neon green eyes stared at Dana. She added, softly, “Why did you lie?”

  It had been a snap to mislead Oliphant, but Lexy was her friend and priest and knew her better than anyone except David.

  “Why did you come here? How did you even know where he lives?”

  “A picture-“

  “You’re lying.”

  “Is there a problem?” Oliphant asked from across the room, where he was talking to a man taking photographs of the apartment and blood splatters.

  “We’re both upset,” Dana said, as if anyone in the room needed to be told.

  Oliphant turned back to the photographer.

  “Dana, for the love of God, my brother’s dead. If you know why, you have to tell me.”

  Dana stood up.

  “You know,” Lexy whispered, wide-eyed. “You know.”

  I know. I know.

  Dana heard David’s car in the driveway and pretended to be asleep. Sometimes she pretended so convincingly-her eyes closed, each breath deep and even-that she woke in the morning having slept the night through. But method acting would not work tonight. She would not sleep, had no right to sleep.

  She had known Micah was unstable, but he was so full of life when they were together that if someone had suggested he would one day put a bullet in his brain she would have said it was impossible. Now, too late, she remembered what Lexy had told her years before. Micah’s depressive disease had been severe. Twice he had been hospitalized, on
ce for violent behavior. In high school he had often talked about suicide. He never stayed long on his medication, claiming it dulled the edge of his creativity. He’d never had a sustained relationship with a woman.

  She remembered all this now. When she met Micah and fell tumbling into his dream of love and let it seal around them and make a closed world impervious to reality and subject only to the laws of passion and impulse, the Micah she knew every day had been so vital that he drove out everything Lexy had told her.

  And when his dreamworld no longer suited her, she had hacked her way out of it and come home to safe San Diego.

  On the dreary flight from Italy she had sworn to expunge Micah from her thoughts. If she could do that, she would be safe. David would never know she had been unfaithful, and for her, too, it would eventually seem that the affair never happened. The details would fade, as details always did.

  She cringed as she recalled how confident she had been that she could erase what was inconvenient to remember.

  Imogene had called her willful, as if it were a flaw in her person ality. Until now Dana had seen it as strength. In her efforts to forget Micah and pretend their affair never happened, she had been more successful than even she would have believed possible. When she didn’t talk about Micah, Lexy had assumed they didn’t get along and left it at that, though she was perplexed. She told David that Micah was a nice guy, but kind of peculiar. David said what did she expect:’ He was an artist.

  Micah had sent passionate letters, and at first she thought it would not hurt to read them; but his threats and pleas and fervid declarations only made her miserable and more aware of how narrowly she had avoided a ruinous mistake and more determined to obliterate him and Florence from her memory.

  No wonder she didn’t want to work on her thesis.

  She had burned his last two letters in the barbeque, unopened. She had willed herself to forget everything about Micah.